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He was born in Pavlovsky Posad near Moscow. His mother was a kindergarten teacher and his father an engineer in the local textile factory.[1] Vyacheslav dreamed of acting but his parents envisioned a different career, and during the war he worked in a munitions factory.[1] After employment as a metal worker, he began [training for an] acting career in 1945.[2] by entering, not without difficulty, the Actors’ Faculty of VGIK. After graduating VGIK with honours in 1950, he began his acting career on stage of Theatre Studio of Film Actor, where he worked for six years.

In 1948 he married Nonna Mordyukova, a popular actress at the time (the couple had one son, Vladimir,[3] also an actor who died in 1990). The marriage was dissolved in 1963.[4] Later Tikhonov married a second time to Tamara Ivanovna Tikhonova and had one child with her, Anna Tikhonova[5] (also an actor) in 1969.[6]

He died on 4 December 2009 in Moscow, Russia.[2] Russian President Dmitry Medvedev expressed his condolences to Tikhonov's family.[2]

Tikhonov made his film debut in 1948. For the next few years, he appeared in relatively low-profile films and at the Film Actors' Studio Theatre in Smolensk.[1] One of his notable roles there was the bear in the Erast Garin production of Evgeny Shvarts's fairy-tale An Ordinary Miracle.[1]

Tikhonov became more well-known with the release of the rural family drama Delo bylo v Penkove (It Happened in Penkovo, 1958), which was followed by several wartime dramas: Maiskie Zvyozdy (May Stars, 1959), set in Prague, and Na Semi Vetrakh (On the Seven Winds, 1962), on the Western front.[1] In Yevgeny Tashkov's Zhazhda (Thirst, 1959), based on real events, Tikhonov, in the first of his spy roles, portrays a scout in an operation to free an Odessa water plant from the Nazis.[1]

In Dve Zhizni (Two Lives, 1961) Tikhonov plays the less fortunate of two men who unwittingly meet in France, 40-odd years after fighting on opposite sides of the 1917 Revolution.[1] Rostotsky's Dozhivyom do Ponedelnika (We'll Live Till Monday 1968), in which a history teacher plans to defend a student at a disciplinary meeting, earned Tikhonov a state prize.[1] In 1979 Rostotsky made a documentary about his friend, called Profession: film actor."[1]

In 1973, Tikhonov starred in the role for which he is most known for in the former Soviet republics, when director Tatiana Lioznova chose him over Smoktunovsky to star in an adaptation of Yulian Semyonov's novel Seventeen Moments of Spring[1] as Standartenführer Stierlitz. The 17 moments are 17 days in the spring of 1945 just before the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II and centers around attempts by some of the Soviet Union's men in Germany to thwart secret peace talks between the Nazis and the U.S. and Britain.[2] The film enjoyed enormous popularity among Russian viewers of several generations. Prior to that, however, it had faced the risk of remaining unknown: Mikhail Suslov had opposed the film to go on general release. He had claimed that the film was not showing the feat of the Soviet people in the war. Fortunately, the decision to release the would-be classic film was supported by KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov.[1] Although several of Semyonov's Stierlitz novels were adapted for the screen, Tikhonov did not return, perhaps feeling that the original series was definitive.[1] The role won him the title People's Artist of the USSR, one of a number of awards.[1]

In 1976, [Tikhonov] rejoined Bondarchuk in an adaptation of Sholokhov's They Fought for Their Country.[1] It suited Tikhonov by concentrating on character rather than histrionics and won him another state prize in the year that he finally joined the Communist Party.[1] 1977 saw a change of pace with Rostotsky's Oscar-nominated Beliy Bim Chernoe Ukho (White Bim the Black Ear), in which Tikhonov played a middle-aged writer who is "adopted" by a non-pedigree setter puppy.[1]

Though he was often typecast as militiamen or spies, there were good roles among them, such as the KGB general in the cold-war thriller TASS upolnomochen zayavit (Tass is authorised to announce, 1984), another television series based on a Semyonov novel.[1] In later years he was able to display a wider range, including the bishop in Besy, a film version of Dostoyevsky's The Devils (1992) and Charlemagne, in the Ubit Drakona, (To Kill a Dragon, 1998) after Evgeny Shvarts's wartime satire.[1] Shvarts was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen, and Tikhonov appeared in Eldar Ryazanov's fantasy-biography of the Danish fabulist, Andersen: Life Without Love (2006), playing God.[1] In 8 February 2003, Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, third degree, to Tikhonov.[7]

Tikhonov appeared in Nikita Mikhalkov's Oscar-winning Burnt By the Sun (1994) and also appeared in the 2010 sequel, which finished shooting before his death.